on display: sam forsythe & brian rogers

on display is an exhibition format specially conceived for the basis reading room. Young artists are invited to present current videos parallel to the exhibition program in a regular monthly cycle. The solo presentation at the reading room gives the public a chance to engage intensively with the work in question, and, further, over a long period the opportunity to get to know works by a wide range of young artists working in the field of moving pictures.

We are delighted to present the work Possibilia Surgery by Sam Forsythe & Brian Rogers from September 19, to October 12. The opening will take place on September 18, from 7 p.m.

In their first collaboration, Forsythe & Rogers have created a suite of videos detailing the functional psychedelia resulting from the invasion of a digital space by a rogue cognitive agent. Through an obsessive attention to the rhythmic and geometric qualities of digital media, landscapes, sounds and narratives are streamed through multiple spatial and temporal frames, spilling out like the neural death throes of a future video game. The sequence is composed of 5 chapters, each negotiating an aspect of the violent collusion of consciousness and technics; the cunning forces that ensnare us in traps that might bootstrap us into the universe, or leave us stripped of all that makes us human. Or both. Hopefully both. Possibilia Surgery is part of an ongoing collaborative work detailing the fictional world of ‘Obsidian’, a multi-disciplinary platform engaging film and digital media, performance, design, philosophy, and cognitive science.

Sam Forsythe lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. In addition to his own video and performance works, he is a member of the performance collective New Forms of Life.

Brian William Rogers is an artist and writer living in Beirut. His work has been published and exhibited internationally.

Possibilia Surgery

- text by Sam Forsythe & Brian Rogers

You switch on your computer. Something is different. There is a folder on the desktop that was not there when you switched it off. The icon is a small, black box. It is labeled:

OBSIDIAN

You double-click it. Welcome to Obsidian Operating System. Would you like to continue? Are you sure? Initializing. Thankyou. Good luck. Pop-up windows effloresce. Files resembling abstract forensics: texts, images, sounds, rhythms. Impartial information. Ambient information. Impossibly compressed heuristics. The unevenly distributed coordinates of a plot. You follow the leads. Cliffs are scaled. Water is measured. Neural detection. Shards of fiction become geometries, and vice versa. Your screen and your attention become granular. You are abducted, abduced. Meso and micro orbits of thought feeding back into each other. Digital erosion. Reading undermining semiotics. All you can do is attempt to organize, grasp, until the discipline erodes just as quickly. The insectoid cacophony turns to music and you realize you can see new colors, in spectra you have only just invented. Topography becomes topology and you bore through time via universalized vectors. An upwards avalanche of data, coordinates, views, horizons. The breaking of conceptual symmetries. Like always, it all happens on low-lit flatness, yet the movement is physical, exhausting. Turbulence. Clouds, cuts, vagueness. If all this was yours, would you know what to do with it? There can/will be more. Do you wish to continue?